Since I doubt if anyone gives much of a toss and almost no one will see this it seems like a suitable place to vent somewhat about my involvement with the popular pop singer James Blunt - he's a folky balladeer who's shifted a couple of million records in the UK and is set to be the next big thing in the world (this year at least...) according to Tom Sturges, the screaming cover of Billboard and just about everyone who knows about these things. I think if I stick to the facts then nobody could accuse me of doing anything other than that.
I was introduced to James late in 2001 by a friend of mine, Dixie Chassay, who was his girlfriend at the time. She told me he was a singer and I should check him out. We met and he sang a couple of bits for me with his guitar and we hung out. His stuff was crude, occasionally laughably direct, and betrayed his relative lack of musicianship or discernible influence - it sounds unlikely but I think he genuinely hadn't even heard of some people like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell let alone taken any of their music on board (a fact about which he was at least open and affable). But I kind of loved the guy. He was great looking in a short-arsed Tom Cruise-y kind of way and he had this girlish singing style that brilliantly offset his back story - he was an actual serving Captain in the Queen’s Coldstream Guards or something and he'd served as a UN tank commander in the Bosnian conflict, where by all accounts he'd seen a fair amount of action.
It would probably be an overstatement to say that in terms of his professional musical aspirations James had nothing going on, but he definitely had next to nothing going on. He was being semi-repped by some half-baked college friend and as far as I could tell he'd been pretty much laughed out of the few A&R meetings he'd managed to get - if you hear his record and his strange falsetto style you could probably understand why. He was also "posh", which within the curious reverse-snobbism of the British music industry made him about as enticing as a crooning leper. But this stuff just made him all the more attractive as a prospect to me, a similarly public-school educated (the opposite of what that means in the US) writer/producer with a bit of pop success that I wasn't particularly well equipped to exploit and on the lookout for a project that I could nurture and sink my teeth into. It has also always seemed abundantly clear to me that while the expense-account drones are all looking off towards one horizon in search of the next so-and-so the actual next big thing tends to trot over the hill behind them that they were resolutely ignoring.
